


A quick number-crunching and data analysis session: Is Dean written as a bottom more often (on AO3)?

by lejf



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Also an invitation for discussion, M/M, Meta, Not a fic, but don't expect a fully-fledged report, look at it if you're curious, seriously i just slapped this together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-27
Updated: 2017-01-28
Packaged: 2018-09-20 05:20:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9477335
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lejf/pseuds/lejf
Summary: This is a brief, slightly inconclusive statistical analysis and outline of Dean’s bottoming (& explicit works, & non-con) numbers with respect to Sam and Castiel. Sam and Castiel are used as comparisons as they are the most written pairings with Dean and have the most works in Supernatural overall, after Dean.Join me in my number-wrangling.Edit: Now with another chapter to clear up some of the Sam/Dean tagging ambiguity.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> For those in a hurry: 
> 
> \- Dean is tagged as bottom more when paired with Castiel.  
> \- Dean is tagged as bottom less when paired with Sam. Manual searching reveals, however, that Bottom Dean occurs more often.

This was conducted to determine whether my perception was faulty and Dean truly did have more bottoming fics. I’ll discuss more on why I chose to do this later.

 

Table 1: General Comparison, Raw Data, Trial 1

### Bottoming

Above holds the first rendition of raw data, and I haven’t adjusted the values to appropriate s.f. for it to feel particularly legible right now. Just read along, and I’ll explain the table.

The first row is for the Bottom [character] tag. This means there are 4428 works tagged Bottom Dean throughout the entire site. Right off the bat you’ll notice that there are far more Bottom Dean tags than both Bottom Sam and Bottom Castiel. This could be attributed to the fact that Dean has a greater number of works written about him — but, if you take a look, the yellow bars indicates that proportions are not equal _._ If Sam had, proportionally, the same amount of Bottom Sam tags used in his works as Dean had in his, the yellow bar in the ‘Bottom tag’ row for Sam’s column would reach up to his ‘Total works’.

Of course, that seems qualitative. That’s where the next two subheadings come in. Confusingly labelled, '[other]:Dean' and '[other]:Dean, fitted to work no _._ '

‘[other]:Dean’ is basically useless in terms of analysis. It was for my data processing. So, look at the one that’s been fitted. Basically, '[other]:Dean' means Sam:Dean or Castiel:Dean. Sam’s bottom tag ratio to Dean’s is 1:1.98.

How did I get this number? The unfitted column is just 4428/1780, and so is higher. The fitted column is 4428/(1.256*1780). That is, the number of Bottom Dean tags divided by the number of Bottom Sam tags _if_ _Sam also had 120545 works._ The ratio 1.256 is Total Dean works/Total Sam works. I’ve essentially assumed here that the ratio of Bottom Sam tags to Total Sam works remains constant. It’s a pretty safe assumption, and it’s also the reason why I chose the two most-written characters after Dean for this analysis.

So, hear this: The Bottom Dean tag seems to be used nearly twice as often as Bottom Sam. 1.98 times more often, incidentally, if Sam had the same number of works as Dean. Otherwise it’d be 2.49 times as often. We’ll mention how this is somewhat misleading later.

 **The Bottom Dean tag** , even when Sam and Castiel’s Bottom tags have been extrapolated, **seems** **still used more often than both** , popularity aside, everything else aside that I'll bring up later.

### Explicit Rating

I applied this too to the Explicit rating. Dean is still featured the most in explicit-rated works, but only by a tiny, tiny little bit. Around 200 fics, I believe. Sam comes second on the porn podium. Then Castiel.

There’s a great deal of uncertainty with this one, of course. There’s the multitude of unrated work that could either be explicit or non-explicit. Adding the unrated as both, respectively (either to Dean's count or whose he's being compared to), gives absolute maximum and minimum values you can see up there in the table. Uncertainty is at a whopping ± 82.9% for Sam and ± 87.7% for Castiel, but that’s misleading, because that’s assuming _all_ of Dean’s unrated works are non-explicit, and _all_ of the others’ _are._ The range is pretty large, but rest assured that the mean still sits where Dean is featured just a bit more than the others.

### Relationship tags

Table 2: Bottom tags under relationship tags

Here, we come across a mystery and a watershed moment. Did you spot it? Under the Sam/Dean tag, Bottom Sam is used more often. This could mean a number of things. People might tag for Bottom Sam more regularly than they tag for Bottom Dean (considering around 22.6-26.0% of people tag under this ship (using the E rating + un-rated rating), or maybe Sam is really just getting dicked more.

But(t) why was Bottom Sam appearing a lot less in the individual tags than under these relationship ones? The answer is in the mumbo-jumbo tags. 9539 Sam/Dean works are rated E. <2515 are tagged for whoever’s bottoming, with leeway if they’re both switching in one fic. Previously, out of **19979** of Sam’s explicit fics, only **1780** of them were tagged. **1321** of Sam’s bottom tags are from this one relationship tag. So what’s going on here?

### Here's where my headers fall apart because I have to re-trace my steps

I’ll tell you. Sam seems to have a lot of fics written about him, right? But– half the time he’s only appearing in passing in a Cas/Dean fic and that’s bumping up his appearances. So I went back and looked at the numbers, deeply enraged because Sam had misled me all this time.

Sam, instead of 95991 works, has 59046 works when the Dean/Castiel tag is omitted, and instead of 19979 explicit has 12915. These numbers are not perfect. They vary by the thousands for some reason if you type in -“Dean/Cas” or -“Castiel/Dean Winchester” or -“Dean Winchester/Castiel”. While on one hand, this drop shows a fairly consistent explicit to total work ratio, consider this. I decided I had to do the same for Castiel, omitting works that included the Sam/Dean tag. It drops by two thousand or so. Sam dropped by around thirty thousand.

I mentioned that the additional tag system is super dodgy. Typing in -”Sam Winchester/Dean Winchester” does not work at all — I have no idea what it omits, but it cuts off about 30k of Castiel’s works. I’ve just been taking away the number of Sam/Dean tags that it lists under relationships, but I have the feeling that it’s still a little inaccurate.

(If you want to know, the way I’d do this in the future is look through all the tags backwards, average out the values. So: under the Castiel tag I’d go to Relationships and take the number of Sam/Dean, then I’d go to the Sam/Dean tag and go to Characters and take down the number of Castiel appearances. Would be time-demanding.)

We get a new table. It’s less conclusive than the last, but still seems to be showing a bit of a trend, where the two others are a little behind Dean on the ol’ getting-dicked numbers. Look at the _[other]:Dean, fitted to work no._ numbers. Sam's at a 1:1.219 and Cas is 1:1.056. Consider it 5:6 and 20:21.

Table 3: General information, Raw Data, Redone.

Regardless! We power on. The numbers here are clearly a bit muddy, due to the multiple ships, a slightly faulty tagging-filtration system, and Sam standing around as an awkward third wheel. He’s basically attached to Dean, so, it’s not surprisingly, really.

Explicit-wise, Sam’s now pulling in front. Sam’s got the gold cup for explicit fic. Go get’em, buddy. Then Dean, then Castiel. I’m not surprised; their explicit ratios should be around the same considering all of them tend to star in the same E fics.

 

Let's go back to Table 2. Here it is.

It appears, so far, referring back to Table 2, that Sam actually bottoms more than Dean when the two of them are paired, and Castiel does a major part of the topping when he and Dean are paired. Dean bottoms more often overall, then, with Castiel pulling the slack. (Literally).

Of course, there’s still the huge fact that only ~25% of Sam/Dean explicit works are tagged, and ~30% of Dean/Castiel’s explicit works are tagged. Forget uncertainty — there’s probably some more stuff with switching and the tags being used more often. AO3’s filtration system is honestly dodgy, too; maybe I just can’t use it right.

Edit: Dearest Anon tells me as a confirmation to the aforementioned 'people might tag for Bottom Sam more',

> There are a lot of tags that are tagged as bottom!sam but in reality include switching. If you check out early supernatural works, you would notice that authors more consistently used bottom!sam tags than bottom!dean ones, precisely because bottom!dean was considered as the norm for the fandom whenever there were explicit scenes. So people felt it was appropriate to warn when it went other way --simply bc bottom!sam was such a novelty and wasn't the cup of tea for a lot of readers. So un-tagged work may be skewed in one way.

This means a) likely the ~25% tag rate is even lower, given that some _appear_ to be tagged by having Bottom Sam but are still missing their Bottom Dean tag, and that there's still a huge range for leeway here. I wouldn't go out saying that Sam bottoms more than Dean, in this case. Further investigation to be done for Sam/Dean specifically. I'd want to investigate whether this carries over to Dean/Castiel and why, but there are honestly too many fics there for me in a one-man mission. 

 

But here’s the most telling piece of evidence.

Filtered for **no** Dean/Castiel, **no** Dean/Sam, because they usually just indicate some past relationship where it's still a cute D/C or S/D romance. Might be some Dean/John in these numbers, but Dean/John AND Dean/OMC generally means one thing...

Table 3: [Character]/OMCs (Original Male Character(s))

Yeah.

...

You know, weirdly enough, as a frequenter of the Sam/Dean tag, I actually felt like Dean bottomed more often, too. Maybe it’s a more recent thing, maybe it’s something else. Who knows ?My perception seems wrong based off what's here right now. I hadn’t planned on going so far or meeting so many roadblocks. I might do some more analysis on these three and try to get this working more accurately later, when I have time.

Here’s a quick thing for Dean and the non-con tag, too:

Obviously these got a bit tricky because I didn’t know which one was the non-con performing party; for instance, under Sam/Dean  Castiel/Dean came up (112) too. I chose not to filter out the other relationship tags.

Under the Sam/Dean tag, non-con came up **1192** times. Under Castiel/Dean, **1512**.

848/245/+ and 838/440/+ for E/M/other rating split, respectively. The original relationship tags have Explicit+Mature fics total of 14450 and 22877, respectively. By these proportions you don’t need to calculate to see that **Sam/Dean experience more non-con**.

First off: okay, let’s look at Sam/Dean + non-con. Bottom Dean came up as one of the most used ( **72** ).

Castiel/Dean + non-con: Same goes. Bottom Dean ( **147** ).

This isn’t exactly indicative of who got assaulted, but I’d say it’s pretty safe to assume. This might be a reason why Sam/Dean non-con seems to crop up twice as much: they get more non-con on the Sam/Lucifer side.

Edit: There's also the notion that it  _seems_ right now that the Sam/Dean tag tags Bottom Dean less because it's generally assumed. 

 

 

Anyway, that’s this brief number session done. Make of the numbers what you will, if you're interested. I might do more.

 

The reason for this entire thing (and you might disagree with me on this one...) is just that I’ve noticed of late that Jensen/Dean seems to frequently star as the bottom and/or the abused for kink purposes, and — I’ve no doubt to it, it’s not a huge mystery, because Dean as a character invites himself to such. The show’s chosen to give him a vulnerable edge, being both starved of (emotional) attention/affection and insufferably loyal. Add his face and you’ve a 100x multiplier for kink. “Pretty” comes up exceedingly often. It’s kind of fascinating, really, how his vulnerability causes people to then turn like well-synchronised satellite heads towards one common factor: sex. Cock-canoodling. Knob-hankering. Sausage-slobbering.

This number crunch was done to see if that feeling was founded.

And it was, kind of, especially on the OMC front– which, really, was the one I was looking for. In the grand scheme of things, 350 is a tiny number, but if you look, the most popular one is [Powerless](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1418542) by LittleSparrow69 with 1038 kudos and a hell-ton of hits. It's pretty substantial.

... And it’s actually pretty good, I’ll admit.


	2. Sam/Dean: Kudos and Time

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kudos and year breakdown of tagging + a few other things. 
> 
> Dean bottoms more between Sam/Dean, if you're in a hurry.

The Dean/Sam tag remains a mystery, but I’ve more evidence for you guys this time that should answer things to the best of my ability, and a bit of fun extra.

 

### Time

Our earliest fic was "Tricking" by rivkat, 15 Sep 2008. Rivkat, if you're reading this, you're one helluva magnificent bastard, you. This turns up under the Sam/Dean tag, sorted by posting date. Under the advanced search, "Bitch" by arby was first at 6 Nov 2005. I think this is due to the editable posting dates. Neither of these, of course, are actually first. Super-wiki cites janedavitt's "Reunion" on livejournal, I think. I'm inclined to believe it's true.

Table 1: Tagging by time

A lot of numbers. I know. This took a while to gather, I assure you. The most important columns here are obviously the first two: Bottom tags, Sam and Dean. They weren’t a trend for until around the last 2-3 years. That’s when only about 25% of explicit fics were being tagged. 

This means around **4388** E works weren’t tagged up to then out of an all-time total of 9527, and **9797** works in total missed out of the  >25% tagging rate. The tag rate (last column) was calculated like this: ((Bottom Sam) + (Bottom Dean) - (Both bottom) all req. Explicit)/ Explicit works total. This way was more reliable so I could omit out the >half that wasn’t rated E and thus less likely to be aimed towards sex.

Graphically, these are the numbers.

Graph 1: Table 1 graphed

 

Anyway, the table again:

The switching trend and its sudden increased use is also interesting. Make of it what you will. All I noticed was that the double bottom ones tended to be polyamorous.

Also notable is that the Bottom tags > their respective Top tags. All I can think is that this is indicative of the fact people care less about who tops, but rather who bottoms. It’s kind of a strange trend, but consistent. If they were only tagging one for laziness, “Top” has fewer letters than “Bottom”, so I wouldn’t wager convenience.

Edit: Kind Coragyps has offered a reasonable explanation: Don't tag for both due to redundancy, and tag for Bottom because it's more likely what people would object to, considering topping is technically canon, heterosexually.

The few single digit-ers who tagged near the very start are recurring writers. cozy_coffee and hugemind are the two writers who’ve been tagging their stuff. I only fished through the very earliest for who bottomed — 1 bottom Sam, 2 bottom Dean; the rest didn’t include penetrative sex.

So it seems like the Bottom Sam tag comes up more often in the search, though not in recent times... Just note how unreliable the tags actually are and how you probably shouldn’t believe them. Hopefully this next table will be more useful.

 

### Kudos

Table 2: Tagging by Kudos.  

(The >1500 is all E. Hahah.)

It seems like the Bottom tags are used in a bit of a fifty fifty, right? Well, look over to the “Actual + E”. That’s me going through the highest-kudos 60 fics that weren’t tagged to find out who was bottoming. 

That means Sam actually had 6 solo bottom fics, Dean solo 11. I didn’t read them again, don’t worry; just command-F’d “cock”. It works really well. (The cell that’s cut off says “no explicit penetration”.) If you want to check my numbers, it's (Bottom Tags: Sam + Dean) + (Actual + E: Sam + Dean + No explicit + Both) - Both btm = Total E. The Both in the Actual + E column doesn't overlap, but the Both + btm in the Bottom tags does. It's the only thing that I counted overlapping because I needed it for the % tagged data process. That's why it's taken away. 

Out of all the Explicit fics that involved penetration, guys, out of those 53 and the kudos range of 3163, **67.9% of those involve bottom Dean.** Note that these would also likely be the most popular fics and the ones most people are exposed to. 43.4% involve bottom Sam. It adds up over 100% because I’m including the both bottom tags for these.

I don’t really have a better way of going about this; this seems to be the most data I’ll be able to get unless I’m willing to go through another 185 more. So this is our conclusion, folks. **Bottom Dean is more likely to feature in fics.**

What's also important here that we should note is that out of the 60 explicit, only 7 contained no penetration. If we decided to percentage that and take it as an assumption for generally how many works don't contain explicit penetration, it'd still show that a huge number of the Sam/Dean works involving penetration are untagged. 

Oh, and also, a bit of subsidiary stuff:

Table 3: Omega [character] tags

Bear in mind, again, that D/S tags have shown themselves not to be reliable. I’m not sure about the D/C tags, but they’re showing such a huge trend whereas D/S was more neck-to-neck that it really demanded further investigation.

Where the numbers don’t add up is because Sam’s off mated to Gabriel or a side character and such.

 

 

### Completely irrelevant

Graph 2: Number of Kudos by Fic number, sorted by kudos

Our highest kudos count is at 4163, next 3831. Through our first 20 fics we've already a range from 4163 – 1631.

I’ve fitted twice here, the start and the flattening, and integrated for the total number of kudos’ overall across all Sam/Dean fics. Well — Logger Pro has an integrating system but it doesn't give me a equation to calculate with. It just gives me a value. I _would_ integrate it by hand but log integrals give you something like xlogx = y which, for the purposes of finding x, are really not worth the time. I’d have to by parts, then quadratic, try to automate it through Excel, and it’s just disgusting overall.

I did this at first because I thought about integrating around the y for no. of fics, so I could get an idea of what kudos jumps to get a consistent amount of fics between them so I could get another proper graph. Forget it. It was just some weird maths stuff that was unfeasible due to the aforementioned log integration hassle.

Either way, I just toughed it out with Logger Pro’s system and apparently our middle of the road  (centre of mass, if you’re really interested in how I did it) is fic 3528. This means out of the 21580 or something fics, adding up the number of kudos in the first 3528 is equal the remaining 18052’s kudos. That’s just kind of depressing. But look at it — it gets so exponential up top. Not that shocking.

(The 1.000 correlation is because I fit it just to a group of about 50 points over a huge area).

  
If you think back to Table 2, >1500 – 150 was only 2799 fics out of the 20000. 0 – 150 came up with 19067. I checked. The numbers are right.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And happy Chinese New Year to you all, folks, should that apply!


End file.
